This disclosure relates to software systems, and more specifically, to report generation within enterprise software systems.
Enterprise software systems are typically sophisticated, large-scale systems that support many, e.g., hundreds or thousands, of concurrent users. Examples of enterprise software systems include inventory management systems, budget planning systems, order management systems, inventory management systems, sales force management systems, business intelligent tools, enterprise reporting tools, project and resource management systems, and other enterprise software systems.
A computing device for a user typically connects to the enterprise software system using a computing network. The user computing device may provide an operating environment for execution of an enterprise software application that may be used to generate reports for review of information, such as average product price, cost per employee, sales targets, and the like. Often, the information used to generate the reports may be stored in a relational database, a multidimensional database, or both. A reporting component of the enterprise software application typically submits one or more queries to the database to retrieve and manipulate information used to generate the reports.
While processing the queries to generate the desired report, the user may require the reporting component to perform both relational operations and multidimensional operations on the underlying data. For example, the combination of both relational operations and multidimensional operations introduces complexities and potential ambiguities into the report generation process, possibly resulting in a degraded user experience.